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Marse Henry (Vol. 2)

H >> Henry Watterson >> Marse Henry (Vol. 2)




On the whole I have not known many men more unfortunate than John
Throckmorton, who, but for "Old Hell's Delight," would have encountered
little obstacle to the pursuit of prosperity and happiness.



III


Another interesting Kentuckian of this period was John Thompson Gray.
He was a Harvard man--a wit, a scholar, and, according to old Southern
standards, a chevalier. Handsome and gifted, he had the disastrous
misfortune just after leaving college to kill his friend in a duel--a
mortal affair growing, as was usual in those days, out of a trivial
cause--and this not only saddened his life, but, in its ambitious aims,
shadowed and defeated it. His university comrades had fully counted on his
making a great career. Being a man of fortune, he was able to live like
a gentleman without public preferment, and this he did, except to his
familiars aloof and sensitive to the last.

William Preston, the whilom Minister to Spain and Confederate General, and
David Yandell, the eminent surgeon, were his devoted friends, and a notable
trio they made. Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester and I--very much younger
men--sat at their feet and immensely enjoyed their brilliant conversation.

Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. Gross and Dr. Sayre the
ablest surgeon of his day, but he was also a gentleman of varied experience
and great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris and was the pal
of John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine, Dumas and Lemaître.
He knew Béranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard to find three
Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly wise
than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.

Indeed the list of my acquaintances--many of them intimates--some of them
friends--would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreigners,
embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles to Grover
Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John Chamberlin
to Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a professional
gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been a gallant
Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and circumstance
diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the poetic fancy
and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he died, like a
veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He was not a bad sort in
business, as the English say, nor in conviviality. But in fighting he was
"a dandy." The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme
and unreal view of life. It flies to extremes. There are middle men.
Travers used to describe one of these, whom he did not wish particularly to
emphasize, as "a fairly clever son-of-a-gun."




Chapter the Twenty-Ninth

About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His
Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of
1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example



I


I have had a liberal education in party convocations, State and national.
In those of 1860 I served as an all-around newspaper reporter. A member of
each National Democratic Convention from 1876 to 1892, presiding over the
first, and in those of 1880 and 1888 chosen chairman of the Resolutions
Committee, I wrote many of the platforms and had a decisive voice in all of
them.

In 1880 I had stood for the renomination of "the Old Ticket," that is,
Tilden and Hendricks, making the eight-to-seven action of the Electoral
Tribunal of 1877 in favor of Hayes and Wheeler the paramount issue. It
seems strange now that any one should have contested this. Yet it was
stoutly contested. Mr. Tilden settled all dispute by sending a letter to
the convention declining to be a candidate. In answer to this I prepared a
resolution of regret to be incorporated in the platform. It raised stubborn
opposition. David A. Wells and Joseph Pulitzer, who were fellow members of
the committee, were with me in my contention, but the objection to making
it a part of the platform grew so pronounced that they thought I had best
not insist upon it.

The day wore on and the latent opposition seemed to increase. I had been
named chairman of the committee and had at a single sitting that morning
written a completed platform. Each plank of this was severally and closely
scrutinized. It was well into the afternoon before we reached the plank I
chiefly cared about. When I read this the storm broke. Half the committee
rose against it. At the close, with more heat than was either courteous or
tactful, I said: "Gentlemen, I wish to do no more than bid farewell to a
leader who four years ago took the Democratic party at its lowest fortunes
and made it a power again. He is well on his way to the grave. I would
place a wreath of flowers on that grave. I ask only this of you. Refuse me,
and by God, I will go to that mob yonder and, dead or alive, nominate him,
and you will be powerless to prevent!"

Mr. Barksdale, of Mississippi, a suave gentleman, who had led the
dissenters, said, "We do not refuse you. But you say that we 'regret' Mr.
Tilden's withdrawal. Now I do not regret it, nor do those who agree with
me. Could you not substitute some other expression?"

"I don't stand on words," I answered. "What would you suggest?"

Mr. Barksdale said: "Would not the words 'We have received with the deepest
sensibility Mr. Tilden's letter of withdrawal,' answer your purpose?"

"Certainly," said I, and the plank in the platform, as it was amended, was
adopted unanimously.

Mr. Tilden did not die. He outlived all his immediate rivals. Four years
later, in 1884, his party stood ready again to put him at its head.
In nominating Mr. Cleveland it thought it was accepting his dictation
reënforced by the enormous majority--nearly 200,000--by which Mr.
Cleveland, as candidate for Governor, had carried New York in the preceding
State election. Yet, when the votes in the presidential election came to be
counted, he carried it, if indeed he carried it at all, by less than 1,100
majority, the result hanging in the balance for nearly a week.



II


In the convention of 1884, which met at Chicago, we had a veritable
monkey-and-parrot time. It was next after the schism in Congress between
the Democratic factions led respectively by Carlisle and Randall, Carlisle
having been chosen Speaker of the House over Randall.

Converse, of Ohio, appeared in the Platform Committee representing Randall,
and Morrison, of Illinois, and myself, representing Carlisle. I was bent
upon making Morrison chairman of the committee. But it was agreed that
the chairmanship should be held in abeyance until the platform had been
formulated and adopted. The subcommittee to whom the task was delegated
sat fifty-one hours without a break before its work was completed. Then
Morrison was named chairman. It was arranged thereafter between Converse,
Morrison and myself that when the agreed report was made, Converse and
I should have each what time he required to say what was desired in
explanation, I to close the debate and move the previous question. At this
point General Butler sidled up. "Where do I come in?" he asked.

"You don't get in at all, you blasted old sinner," said Morrison.

"I have scriptural warrant," General Butler said. "Thou shalt not muzzle
the ox that treadeth the corn."

"All right, old man," said Morrison, good-humoredly, "take all the time you
want."

In his speech before the convention General Butler was not at his happiest,
and in closing he gave me a particularly good opening. "If you adopt this
platform of my friend Watterson," he said, "God may help you, but I can't."

I was standing by his side, and, it being my turn, he made way for me, and
I said: "During the last few days and nights of agreeable, though rather
irksome, intercourse, I have learned to love General Butler, but I must
declare that in an option between him and the Almighty I have a prejudice
in favor of God."

In his personal intercourse, General Butler was the most genial of men. The
subcommittee in charge of the preparation of a platform held its meetings
in the drawing-room of his hotel apartment, and he had constituted himself
our host as well as our colleague. I had not previously met him. It was
not long after we came together before he began to call me by my Christian
name. At one stage of the proceedings when by substituting one word for
another it looked as though we might reach an agreement, he said to me:
"Henry, what is the difference between 'exclusively for public purposes'
and 'a tariff for revenue only'?"

"I know of none," I answered.

"Do you think that the committee have found you out?"

"No, I scarcely think so."

"Then I will see that they do," and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtle
way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours.

He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was serious
belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidential
ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr.
Breckinridge's doorway. "What do you think of that?" I asked Andrew
Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: "I
never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself." I have been told
that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence.
In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of
being something of an intellectual sharper.

He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order which
had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warn
bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the
interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in
Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality.
Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company,
became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky
Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proven
that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the Yankee
Boanerges on a public occasion.



III


Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen too
much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to think
that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade and
Protection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what
was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme--

--"_The good old rôle--the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can_."

How little wisdom one man may get from another man's counsels, one nation
may get from another nation's history, can be partly computed when we
reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition.

Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life.
Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative,
the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of
events, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth
century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like the
Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic and
an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealth
with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes,
he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion of
the times.

He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He
built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be
great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency
and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foresee
the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as three
centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.

I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least
oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in the
United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took at
least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the
Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin.

Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, and
the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando--Tangier on one
side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other--Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson
fought the famous battle, midway between them--has had its share.

Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitive
man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillaging
statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding
constituencies--thus I used to put it--the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid
broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United
States.

It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changes
on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another man
who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an invention
of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political
economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the
most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa
were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New England
and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, which
was open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings
of the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the
palaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a
thousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park
and along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the
Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of
the Anthropophagi, "whose heads do reach the skies," may tell how the
voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money,
until "Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and they
swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes."

The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly
is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as
then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has found
its way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not,"
according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz." We have
had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him who
contrives and waits.

Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." And, likewise, "leaders" and
"bosses." What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about
Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main
was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off to
keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, once
filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shall
say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing
to another old freebooter: "They order these things better in the
'States.'"



IV


I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlike
any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound to
respect him.

There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate because
part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought from
Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee
who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner,
is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with the
fruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestor
was Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas,
where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some
mariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money.

Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To such
base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles on
the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon the
green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened;
neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but a
phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.

There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich and
prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the political
fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always "devil take the
hindmost," community of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of Spain,"
that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated
gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as
vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood
and Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may be
traced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations
and appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activity
that show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.




Chapter the Thirtieth

The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The
Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New
Freedom"



I


The makers of the American Republic range themselves in two
groups--Washington, Franklin and Jefferson--Clay, Webster and Lincoln--each
of whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself and his best to
the cause of national unity and independence.

In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln saved
the Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a good
historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rare
foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, including
Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formative
period.

There are those who call these great men "back numbers," who tell us we
have left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightened
progress--who would displace the example of the simple lives they led and
the homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which had
made Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the Old
Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacle
and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom.
Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the New
Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that would
be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would cheapen the
very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into a
moving picture show.

I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes
"stick in my gizzard." I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones--

"Who love their land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Who'd shake hands with a king upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his majesty."

I have many rights--birthrights--to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian,
beside that of more than fifty years' service upon what may be fairly
called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.

My grandmother's father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a company
of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched it
westward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where
my grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general. My grandfather,
James Black's father, the Rev. James Black, was chaplain of the fort. He
remembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife. He was a
noble stalwart--a perfect type of the hunters of Kentucky--who could bring
down a squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull's eye at a hundred
yards after he was three score and ten.

It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly lurid
narrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and feathers,
with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to the tale. He
would sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take me with him afield
to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of many grandchildren to be
named in his will. In my thoughts and in my dreams he has been with me all
my life, a memory and an example, and an ever glorious inspiration.

Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes.



II


Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic side of
a political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to realize, the
transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry Clay. Being of
Tennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson came between;
perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me make some slighting
remark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long Democrat, who, on
opposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me.
"Do not express such opinions, my son," he said, "they discredit yourself.
Mr. Clay was a very great man--a born leader of men."

It was certainly he, more than any other man, who held the Union together
until the time arrived for Lincoln to save it.

I made no such mistake, however, with respect to Abraham Lincoln. From the
first he appeared to me a great man, a born leader of men. His death proved
a blow to the whole country--most of all to the Southern section of it.
If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with its
repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would have been
wanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his taking off to
mount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For Lincoln entertained,
with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that the
Southern States--to use his homely phraseology--"should come back home
and behave themselves," and if he had lived he would have made this wish
effectual as he made everything else effectual to which he addressed
himself.

His was the genius of common sense. Of perfect intellectual acuteness and
aplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky.
He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and its
peculiarities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with
strong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist. "If slavery be not
wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong," but he also said and reiterated it
time and again, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are
just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist
among them they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we
would not instantly give it up."

From first to last throughout the angry debates preceding the War of
Sections, amid the passions of the War itself, not one vindictive,
prescriptive word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its progress
there was scarcely a day when he did not project his great personality
between some Southern man or woman and danger.



III


There has been much discussion about what did and what did not occur at the
famous Hampton Roads Conference. That Mr. Lincoln met and conferred with
the official representatives of the Confederate Government, led by the Vice
President of the Confederate States, when it must have been known to him
that the Confederacy was nearing the end of its resources, is sufficient
proof of the breadth both of his humanity and his patriotism. Yet he went
to Fortress Monroe prepared not only to make whatever concessions toward
the restoration of Union and Peace he had the lawful authority to make,
but to offer some concessions which could in the nature of the case go no
further at that time than his personal assurance. His constitutional powers
were limited. But he was in himself the embodiment of great moral power.

The story that he offered payment for the slaves--so often affirmed and
denied--is in either case but a quibble with the actual facts. He could not
have made such an offer except tentatively, lacking the means to carry it
out. He was not given the opportunity to make it, because the Confederate
Commissioners were under instructions to treat solely on the basis of the
recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The conference came to
nought. It ended where it began. But there is ample evidence that he went
to Hampton Roads resolved to commit himself to that proposition. He did,
according to the official reports, refer to it in specific terms, having
already formulated a plan of procedure. This plan exists and may be seen in
his own handwriting. It embraced a joint resolution to be submitted by the
President to the two Houses of Congress appropriating $400,000,000 to be
distributed among the Southern States on the basis of the slave population
of each according to the Census of 1860, and a proclamation to be issued
by himself, as President, when the joint resolution had been passed by
Congress.

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